An 'A' for Improvement : Irvine Campus Is Shifting From 'Second Choice' to Top Notch

By ELAINE GALE

Oct. 19, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

With two Nobel Prizes under its belt and recent appearances on magazine listings of the best colleges, UC Irvine has been cementing its reputation in academe as an up-and-comer.

“UCI is definitely on the rise,” said Steve Sample, president of the University of Southern California, who was chair of the American Assn. of Universities when UCI was admitted two years ago. “UCI is taking its place as one of the 50 leading research universities in America.”

Orange County’s UC campus is recovering from its national embarrassment over the fertility clinic scandals of a few years back and now stands to ride the wave of high-tech and biotechnology research, especially with double-digit increases in private donations, much of it coming from those sectors. Applications and SAT scores of incoming freshmen are up; its rapidly growing computer sciences department is now the largest in the UC system.

“UCI is a miracle,” said Jack Peltason, former UCI chancellor and former president of the UC system. “There are not too many places in the world where you’ll find a university of this size and quality that’s only 33 years old.”

Yet beyond the world of academic observers, UCI continues to be stymied by an image that it still is, simply, second best: a solid, largely commuter school for kids who lacked the money for private schools and the mind-boggling scores needed for Berkeley or UCLA.

“UCI was my second choice,” said 18-year-old UCI freshman Tamar Jaghalian of Pasadena, echoing the sentiments of many classmates. “I wanted to go to UCLA, but I didn’t get in.”

Aside from its relative youth next to such giants as Berkeley and UCLA, Irvine also struggles with location, location, location--suburban Orange County, to most students, simply is not a glam place to spend some of their freest and most exciting years.

More Competition, Prestige Expected

Still, bolstered by technology support money and waves of stellar students knocking at the doors of the relatively low-cost UC system, top administrators say the new millennium is offering Irvine exactly what it needs to hit the big leagues: time.

During the next couple of decades, the entire UC system is expected to grow tremendously, both in size from a huge bulge of students and in prestige as those students seek a limited number of spots at the state’s most elite higher-education system.

Top students are expected increasingly to head to UC as the costs of private college education continue to rise.

Already, many students with A- averages feel discouraged about their chances for admission to the very top UC schools, and second-choice schools such as Irvine are getting pickier about the students they will accept. Educators see this eventually trickling down to the least popular UC campuses. They see the day, not all that far off, when a solid B+ student will be hard put to find a place in the system.

“The competition will be fierce,” said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose. “All the schools will want the cream of the crop.”

Many highly qualified high school students may find themselves turned away by the UC system, said Jerry Hayward, co-directer of Policy Analysis for California Education, based in Sacramento.

“There are many more students who apply than are places for them,” he said. “The pattern is already happening at UCLA and Berkeley, and it will happen at the other campuses of the university as well.”

UCI stands to benefit from this systemwide prestige.

By any account, what the school has achieved in little more than three decades is remarkable. In fact, its greatest recognition has come in the last three years, since it turned 30.

“It’s a remarkable story in American higher education that a new institution starting from scratch would have the kind of distinction they’ve established,” said UC’s President, Richard Atkinson.

The Nobels awarded in 1995 are the linchpin for the school’s higher profile of late, said UCI Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone. The prizes were awarded to faculty members F. Sherwood Rowland for discovering how chlorofluorocarbons were eating a hole in the ozone layer, and the late Frederick Reines for his work with the neutrino, a subatomic particle.

“Most people--especially out East--hadn’t heard of UCI before the Nobels,” Cicerone said. “That made a huge dent.”

UCI’s champions also point out the smattering of rankings during the last couple of years that placed UCI at the top of the heap, including a U.S. News & World Report ranking that lauds UCI as the eighth-best public university in the country. Its creative writing program ranked sixth among all schools, public or private.

UCI first showed up in the rankings in 1995 as 48th out of all universities, public or private. The next year, it jumped to 37th; this year, it was listed 36th.

Although many academics are skeptical about the value of the magazine’s rankings, they are widely read and closely watched--and seem to have given the school’s image a big boost.

“The freshman class in our department alone has increased by 60%,” said Michael Pazzani, chairman of UCI’s department of information and computer science, who also was celebrating a ranking from PC Week magazine that placed UCI in the Top 10 for information technology along with Harvard, Stanford and Columbia.

Perhaps drawn by the rising reputation, applications to UCI are up 12% this year, compared with an 8% increase for the UC system overall.

“If somebody mentioned UCI to me, the first thing I would think about would be its strength, its quality and how far it’s come,” said C. Peter Magrath, president of the National Assn. of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges in Washington, D.C.

A Strong Footing in Biotechnology

Its closest companion in the UC rankings is UC San Diego, which ranks just above Irvine in selectivity and national standing, said Robert Zemsky, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

But he said that if UCI maintains its focus on biotechnology as its next-century niche, the campus will be vying with UC San Diego to emerge as the Southland’s biotech leader.

With biotech widely considered the big industry that will rise to the top after high-tech flattens, the field could be key to Irvine’s future. Experts estimate that 10% of the nation’s biotech industry is located along the 120-mile stretch between L.A. County and the Mexican border, referred to as Bio-Med Boulevard. So far, UC San Diego has the edge, with about 170 biotech and medical tech companies in San Diego County.

UC San Diego’s $77.4 million in private donations last fiscal year dwarfs UCI’s $38.8 million.

And UC San Diego, which has a new, $7.6-million Center for Molecular Genetics, is flanked by other medical monoliths down in San Diego: the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation. The campus has broken ground for a $11-million Howard Hughes Medical Institute facility for molecular biology research.

To strengthen its position, UCI recently sealed a $26-million deal to expand the 85-acre University Research Park, a business center on the edge of campus designed to bulk up UCI’s biomedical research, biotechnology, information technology and engineering. The research park at UCI is expected to generate an estimated $80 million in lease revenue alone for UCI during the next 25 years.

Private donations to biotech and medical fields are up this year; the Donald Bren Foundation gave UCI $5 million to recruit biomedical scientists, and Robert and Margaret Sprague of Corona del Mar gave $2.1 million to support brain-imaging research at the College of Medicine. More than 20% of UCI’s undergraduates are majoring in biology.

“Biotech has the possibility of catapulting UCI into the lead of universities working strongly with area industry,” Cicerone said, although he doesn’t want biotech to be UCI’s sole signature in the next century.

“Multimedia and biotechnology are the prospective growth industries for the next century, and they’re all centered in Southern California,” said USC President Sample. “I think UCI has some extraordinary opportunities just by virtue of their location in Orange County.”

But UCI also must shake off its image problems after being dogged by recent scandals and saddled with an unromantic landlocked location in a planned city.

The campus is trying to vault over the mess of the fertility scandal in 1994 and 1995, when UCI doctors were accused of transplanting patients’ fertilized eggs in other women without consent, among other ethical misdeeds.

Aram Chaparyan, president of UCI’s student body, said many freshmen don’t even know about the scandal, but faculty and administrators have felt the aftershocks.

“It stalled our development,” Cicerone said. “We’re just digging out from under it now.”

Riding the Wave of Rising UC Popularity

At this point, his concerns for the millennium are efforts to boost the quality of the school’s graduate programs and prepare for an expected wave of students at an already crowded campus.

The preparation is wildly inadequate, said the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, which released a report last week predicting an extra 611,000 students will hit the already bloated California schools in the coming years.

Projected enrollment at UCI by 2010 is 24,600 students, a growth of about 500 students a year. The campus has grown more selective; 65% of the students who applied got into UCI this year, down from 74% in 1994.

“We’re the campus that used to take all UC-qualified students, but we’re no longer doing it,” Cicerone said. “Last year, we rejected more applicants than ever before.”

UCI partly is riding the overall wave of top students looking for admission to the UC system, with its strong academic reputation at prices thousands below private campuses. Last fall, for example, Berkeley rejected fully a quarter of non-engineering applicants who had a 4.0 grade-point average and a combined SAT score of 1400 and up. At UCI, the percentage was 97% for a student with such scores.

Still, at UCI, the combined SAT score for incoming freshmen has increased 100 points in five years, from 1016 in 1992 to 1117 last year.

“The school has become a lot more competitive to get into,” said Cynthia Garcia of Mission Viejo, who graduated this spring.

Eric Chansy of Anaheim, who had a 3.85 grade-point average in high school, applied only to UCI--but not because it was the school of his dreams. “I thought, ‘I don’t even have a chance at getting into UCLA,’ so I didn’t bother to apply,” he said.

Irvine has the advantage of room for growth, compared with the more congested areas of Westwood and Berkeley, Irvine City Manager Paul Brady said.

“UCI is most ready to absorb students,” he said. “The long-range development plan of Irvine banks on taking in more than 25,000 students to the UCI campus.”

Atkinson said the administration doesn’t want any UC campus to have more than 30,000 students. “UCLA has about 33,000 students right now, and no campus will get that high again,” he said.

At UCI--where the joke on campus is that the initials stand for Under Construction Indefinitely--a new student recreation center, music building and arts complex renovation and a new Earth system science building are among the projects planned or underway.

“We’re certain that if we build, they will come,” said Manuel N. Gomez, UCI vice chancellor for student affairs.

Pazzani, a UCI professor of 12 years, said the biggest problem facing UCI will be managing the growth, an enviable challenge.

“Many faculty members consider the growth at UCI as an opportunity to break into the top tier,” he said.

Still, administrators and students are aware that the school has not reached that status yet.

“UCI is nothing special,” said 21-year-old Andrea Rodriguez of Whittier.

Many students have a litany of complaints: They want more students to live on campus (70% commute), they want a major sports team, they want more of a Greek system, they want a more potent school mascot than the Anteater.

“There’s no school spirit here,” said John Chun of Santa Ana, who commutes to UCI. “Plus, when you come here, you get stuck in Irvine.”

Students seem to yearn for the hip quotient of Westwood or the colorful scene of the Berkeley campus and resent Irvine’s tidy look and lack of night life.

“Irvine as a city is way too conservative,” said Rosaura Tafoya, who commutes from Arroyo Vista. “All the complexes look the same.”

Zemsky agrees that the UC system sustains a distinct split between the lofty reputations of the UCLA, Berkeley and San Diego campuses and the other six locations--including UCI.

The prestige of UCLA and Berkeley, the oldest UC schools, is partially due to simple longevity, some observers say; the youthful Irvine campus is competing with schools toting a 90-plus-year history of hard-earned recognition and flush funding.

Possibly of greater concern is a new UC campus at Merced, estimated to cost the state more than $400 million and scheduled to open in 2005.

Many administrators at existing UC campuses worry that the new school will drain funding that would otherwise have gone to the other campuses, said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

About $55 million in bond fees has been earmarked for UC Merced.

“No one argues that UC will need to make room for more students,” Callan said. “But some say a Merced campus will result in a huge siphoning off of money and will undermine existing campuses.”

But Cicerone notes that only a fourth of UCI’s budget comes from the state. And private support for UCI has nearly doubled over the last five years.

Agreed Zemsky: “There are lots of universities which are terribly envious of UCI and of the support they get.”

* EDUCATION PAGE

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About the Series

Beyond 2000 is a series of articles that explore how our lives will change in the next millennium. The series will continue every Monday through the end of 1998 as The Times Orange County examines what’s in store for the county in such areas as transportation, education, growth and technology.

On The Internet

The Beyond 2000 series and an interactive discussion are available on the Times Orange County Edition’s Web site at https://www.timesoc.com/HOME/NEWS/ORANGE/beyond.htm

A Growing Campus

UC Irvine has grown since it opened Oct. 4, 1965. The original eight buildings and 1,589 students have expanded to more than 100 buildings (not including residential housing) and 17,000 students. A look at UCI’s past and future growth:

Under construction

1. Music Building

2. Environmental Health and Safety

3. University Research Park

4. Expansion of Middle Earth student housing

5. Student Recreation Center

Planned construction (sites not yet final)

Natural Sciences building

Beall Gallery expansion

Mesa Court expansion (student housing)

High Field NMR Facility (Health Sciences Research Imaging Center)

Academic Building (expansion space or classrooms, computer labs)

Source: UCI Campus and Environmental Planning; Researched by RAOUL RANOA / Los Angeles Times

Squeezing Into College: As UCI enrollment has grown, freshman acceptance has declined. This year, the UCI acceptance rate is in the middle of all UC campuses.

UCI Enrollment, Undergraduate students

1988: 13,032

1997: 14,224

Applicant Acceptance:

1994

11,555 out of 15,575 applicants admitted

1998

12,301 out of 19,682 applicants admitted

1998 UC Acceptance:

Berkeley: 31.1%

Davis: 68.3

Irvine: 64.8